What would your people change about how you lead?

This is a question I often ask the leaders I work with.

Not what they'd change about their jobs, their pay, or their projects. But about how you lead.

Most leaders have never asked it. Many have never considered asking, because accountability in most organizations flows in only one direction: downward, from leader to team. It shows up in performance reviews, one-on-ones, and quarterly goals. Except for the occasional 360-degree feedback process, the channel doesn't flow the other way.

For generations, we believed a leader needed to be the all-knowing one in the room, the person with the answers, the great and powerful Oz behind the curtain. The knowledge economy retired that role. Expertise now lives everywhere in an organization, and the leaders who thrive are the ones honest about what they know and what they don't. But that old belief system still lingers in our habits and how we show up as leaders. Asking your team to evaluate your leadership still feels, to many leaders, like stepping out from behind the curtain with no idea what happens next.

But that vulnerability and honesty are what leadership is about, and your people are watching. And when you show that this type of leadership is possible, what happens next, it turns out, is greater retention.

The question behind the question

This month on LinkedIn, I published Stop Trying to Keep Your People: 5 Retention Strategies to Make Staying Worth It, an argument that the question underneath most retention strategies is the wrong one. Most try to figure out, "How do we keep them?" which treats people as flight risks to be managed. "How do we make staying worth it?" is the better question because it puts the energy where retention actually lives, in what your people experience every day. The five strategies, in brief, included:

1. Get clear on their vision and purpose, then aim their development at that destination, not just this quarter's results.
2. Don't be afraid of their next step, even if it isn't here. Develop them anyway, and be honest about the growth your organization can and can't offer.
3. Teach them to do hard things: the essential human skills like difficult conversations, managing emotions under pressure, and saying no.
4. Create a laboratory of learning, where mistakes become growth, ideas get tried, and expertise gets solicited wherever it lives.
5. You don't need to know everything. Let your people change you.

The full article goes deep on all five, but in this article, I'm leaning into the fifth strategy because it's the one leaders resist most and the one that yields the greatest return.

Accountability is a two-way street

In our People-Forward Leadership™ work, the first pillar is Leader Awareness™. We call it the Mirror, and the name is literal. Your team is the truest mirror you'll ever have, because they experience your leadership as it actually lands, not as you intend it. Every day they hold information about your blind spots, your patterns under pressure, and the gap between what you say and what you do. Most leaders never access it, and so they lead on intention while their people experience impact.

Letting your people change you is how you look into that mirror on purpose. There are three actions you can take to get a clearer look in that mirror.

1. Ask directly, and make it safe to answer. "What would you change about how I lead?" asked in writing first, through a short anonymous prompt or ahead of a one-on-one, gets you truth that a face-to-face ask often can't.
2. Act visibly on one thing. Not five. Choose a change you can make where everyone can see it and sustain it: a meeting habit, a decision practice, a communication pattern.
3. Attribute it out loud. "You identified an area of growth for me as a leader, so I made a change." The credit is the point. It proves the feedback loop works, and a loop that visibly works gets used again.

This is the heart of what I call Recursive Leadership Theory: the idea that leaders and their environments shape each other continuously, and that the leaders who grow are the ones who engage that loop on purpose. The research agrees with the theory. Studies on leader humility directly connect these behaviors- acknowledging limits, spotlighting others' strengths, modeling teachability- to higher engagement, satisfaction, and retention.

And once you see the retention logic, it's hard to unsee. Being able to "lead up" and influence how your leader leads is the deepest form of being heard. A raise says you're paid fairly. A title says you've advanced. But watching your leader genuinely change because of something you said tells you that your thoughts, opinions, and insights matter here, and people stay where they matter.

A word about maturity, on both sides of the mirror. Letting your people change you does not hand them the steering wheel. A leader practicing Leader Awareness™ is already engaged in their own self-reflective work, and not every suggestion will align with where that work is focused. Nor is this an invitation for a team to manage or maneuver their leader. The mature version of this exchange runs in both directions. Employees offer feedback through the lens of their own growth, partnering with their leader to strengthen the entire ecosystem, not to get the leader operating the way they would personally prefer. That distinction is the difference between building a feedback loop and playing tug-of-war with one.

And for the leader on the receiving end, discernment is part of the practice, because not all feedback is good feedback. Before you act, weigh the source, this person's vantage point and history with truth-telling. Weigh the intent: does it serve the team or a private agenda? Weigh the purpose and the likely outcome: what would genuinely improve if you changed this. Discernment is how you separate feedback that serves your greater good and your team's from feedback driven by personal motivation. Looking into the mirror doesn't mean accepting every reflection uncritically. It means being genuinely willing to see.

The loop doesn't build itself

For over two decades, I've seen leaders who are willing to be changed by their people build teams that tell them the truth, adapt faster, and stay longer. But that feedback loop between a leader and their team rarely forms on its own, because one-way accountability habits run deep on both sides.

Building that loop is the work we do at ThriveAxis®. We coach and train leaders, and we work with entire leadership teams, from the leader down, creating the synergy and trust that turn a group of reporting relationships into what we call an empowered ecosystem™. If your retention numbers look stable but your gut says your best people are drifting, the mirror is the place to start, and you don't have to look into it alone.

Click here to 👉🏾 start the conversation with us.

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This article was written by Dr. Carol Parker Walsh, JD, PhD, an award-winning executive coach, organizational strategist, and founder of ThriveAxis®, a leadership development firm that helps organizations cultivate People-Forward Leaders™ and high-performing teams. She created Recursive Leadership Theory, the published research foundation beneath the People-Forward Leadership™ framework.

A CNBC Leadership Expert and contributor to Forbes, Newsweek, and Entrepreneur, Dr. Parker Walsh has been featured on LinkedIn Learning, ABC, CBS, Fast Company, and Fortune. She's a Professional Fellow with the Harvard Institute of Coaching, and her thought leadership has reached more than 100,000 professionals worldwide.

A nationally recognized keynote speaker, TEDx presenter, and four-time Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Award recipient and Webby Honoree Award winner for her thought leadership, she empowers leaders and organizations to thrive amid disruption by building trust, alignment, and adaptive cultures that drive performance and retention.